The space is a field for walkers to practice. Every day I walk through familiar streets, I walk into a process of finding out. In these paths, time, my body and the environmental elements that are being arranged and related offer me pivot points to perceive the space. Space becomes more than just the vague background of a walk and everyday life. It allows walkers to associate themselves closely with a corner of the city. My practice, starting from the perspective of such a curious walker, focuses on how a pedestrian’s perception of space provokes opinions, knowledge, and associations.

If I picture a line to represent my Unit 2 journey, my starting point in Unit 2 would be more like traces hovering around a fixed point. In that project, I wanted to construct a clear understanding towards the ‘fence’, so I did it by writing various definitions. Through this process, the dictionary-like, definitional language isolated the concept of the fence from its original context of space and time. As a tool, language offers me a broad framework for investigating and understanding the fence and allows me to capture the fence as a semantic category, a symbol, and a spatial element. However, the limits of language are also reflected in the process, as sentences become more and more uncertain, vague, fictional and even chaotic along with the expansion of my writing experiment. I cannot forward my journey by emphasising definitions and writing on space.

As people usually integrate fragmented knowledge through diagrams and maps, I wonder whether these forms and structures could help me look at my knowledge from an overall view. Conventional knowledge diagrams always provide clear structures, showing how knowledge is systematically constructed through categorisation, organisation, and integration. In most situations, we are accustomed to taking what’s embedded in these visual forms as answers or as verified reliable information. Although the designers often work hard on visual conventions to make the subjectivity invisible, the structure of a diagram still clearly reflects the attitude and imagination of its makers. Later, as I compared the Figurative System of Human Knowledge with a diagram in The World Explained, which shows how personal knowledge is produced, I used graphical expressions to illustrate the conflicts between the two. Through the experiments, I get a closer look at the loose loop of interactions that is always happening between knowledge systems, individuals, and the world, which facilitates, hinders, and shapes our cognition.

In The World Explained, knowledge is produced on-site. A site is a key element which allows “a multitude of individual perspectives can be observed as they cross and interact.” I started to consider space as a key element in my practice to understand an environmental object that I encounter daily. As I continue to use diagrams as my investigation tool, it helps me to clarify my focus on the control mechanisms within urban spaces. Maps as an output show a selective representation of spaces, which reflects the cartographers’ attitudes and understanding of spaces. It prompts me to look at the process of mapping when the mapper filters and translates their opinion from their interaction with the space. There is also a loop/cross of interactions happening between maps, mappers/pedestrians, and the control mechanism in urban spaces.

Rethinking mapping deepens my perception of space as I‘m pushed to ask and answer questions: What am I paying attention to? What am I recording? What do I want the map to do? Mapping is not to generate answers, solutions, or conclusions. Instead, it creates forces which gradually push me to walk into a process of finding out about the space of both the here and now and in the imagination.

Bibliography

Beltrán, E. (2012) The World Explained: A Microhistorical Encyclopaedia. ROMA publication.